Realism and Architecture*

Graham Harman ()

Abstract: Although “realism” can mean numerous different things in different contexts, it is safe to say that there are two basic types of realism.The first——usually found in the arts and in politics——defines the “real” as the ugly facts of life that cannot be denied.We can call this kind “Realism of Immanence.” The second——most prominent in mathematics——treats the real as that which is superior to anything merely earthly.Let’s call this kind “Realism of Transcendence.” Which sort of realism is a better model for architecture to follow? The answer is neither,since the Realism of Immanence “overmines” architecture by reducing it to its function or program, and the Realism of Transcendence “undermines” it by reducing it downward to a small set of functional elements or even geometrical solids said to be at work in every great building.Instead, the true path for realist architecture requires an “impure” admixture of forms and human functions.But this raises important questions about Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics, which overemphasizes “purity” even while conflating it with “autonomy.” By purity, Kant effectively means the separation of two particular kinds of entities:(1) human thought, and (2) everything else.In this respect he follows the central dogma of modern philosophy, assuming that the human being is something so radically different in kind from the rest of the cosmos that it automatically de-purifies whatever it touches.As a result, architecture is disqualified by Kant as a possible case of pure beauty, since in his view the fact that architecture has a use-value disqualifies it as a purely aesthetic phenomenon.What Kant thereby misses is that the human beholder and the art object it beholds becomes a new third object that is autonomous from its environment even though its two elements (human and art object) are no longer autonomous from each other.

Keywords: realism; architecture; Immanuel Kant; aesthetics; immanence;transcendence

I.The Different Senses of “Realism”

“Realism” (much like “formalism”) is a serious piece of terminology that might seem to border on useless due to its multiple senses across different disciplines, and sometimes even within a single discipline.But as soon as we pin down a few of these different usages we begin to see that the supposed ambiguity of realism is limited and not at all difficult to manage.In fact, it is often easier to identify each type of realism by asking what it opposes rather than what it affirms.

One prominent sense of the term refers to the production of accurate images of the world,regardless of how depressing, ugly, or shocking they may be.The idealism opposed by this type of realism is that of sugar-coated or narrowly privileged pictures of the world.In the novels of Zola or Dreiser, or in Stephen Crane’s

The Red Badge of Courage

, we supposedly encounter a brutally honest depiction of life as it really is, in all its injustice, filth, and arbitrary good and bad fortune.What is rejected at all costs are the reassuring tableaux of romanticized heroes and insipid,gentrified matchmaking, all of it marked by false happy endings.In realist painting, such as that of Corot and Courbet in nineteenth-century France, we encounter true-to-life landscapes and the thankless labor of peasants rather than the prettified or confectionary scenes beloved by many painters but unlikely to occur in the everyday world.This is a realism that thinks itself liberated from delusion.Of a similar type is

political

realism, which——in its extreme form——mocks all highminded ideals and devotes itself to the ruthless calculation of quanta of power.Machiavelli and Hobbes famously belong to this category of thinker, and more recently Carl Schmitt.What we find more often today is a watered-down form of realism that proclaims its commitment to certain ideals while remaining skeptical as to how closely we can approach them.The elder George Bush left the widely reviled Saddam Hussein in office in 1991, in part due to his realist calculations that a power vacuum in Iraq would only strengthen Iran:unlike Bush the younger, who deposed Saddam in 2003, thereby creating precisely the kind of vacuum his more realist father had feared.To summarize, these forms of aesthetic and political realism have a shared disdain for those who avoid accepting reality as it really is, however terrible it may be.Let’s use the name “Realism of Immanence” for realisms of this type.

Precisely the opposite sense of “realism” can be found in its mathematical use.Mathematical realism, generally linked with the philosophy of Plato, holds that mathematical objects——numbers,imaginary numbers, regular solids, sets——have a genuine independent existence outside the mind,quite apart from the varying biographical and psychological ways in which a human being might come to know them.The point of this second kind of realism is not to condemn those who treat numbers as transcendent ideals, but just the opposite:for this sort of realism, mathematical objects are not to be identified with their “real-life” form in our everyday encounter with plastic numbers or wooden and metallic shapes.Mathematical realism can therefore be called a “Realism of Transcendence.”

II.The Meaning of Realism in Architecture

Now, it is interesting to note that the word “realism” rarely occurs in architectural discourse,whether positively or negatively, even though it is a staple of aesthetic terminology outside architecture.This does not necessarily mean that realism is an inherently irrelevant concept for architects.It might simply result from the fact that other interpretations of what realism means have not yet reached bedrock, and are therefore preoccupied with relatively superficial, disciplinespecific problems that would benefit from deeper reflection.In this spirit, let’s ask ourselves if anything valuable might result from a call for architectural realism.

Let’s begin by reflecting briefly on whether realist architecture would entail “Immanent” or“Transcendent” realism.We can start with the latter, since there are those in our midst who call for a more “mathematical” approach to architecture than Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) provides,appealing to the power of computer modelling and the Cantor-influenced Parisian philosophies of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux.See Alain Badiou, , trans.O.Feltham (London:Continuum, 2007); Quentin Meillassoux, :, trans.R.Brassier (London:Continuum, 2008).I see nothing inherently wrong with the notion that the same transcendent objects might have multiple architectural incarnations.For instance, the early Peter Eisenman works along these lines when he argues that architecture essentially boils down to various permutations of oblong and centroidal forms, even if this amounts to merely unifying the two in the corkscrew form of stairwells.See Peter Eisenman, :, (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press,2004).But there is a big difference between appealing——like Eisenman——to a recurring set of basic elements, and going further——like Badiou——to the point of saying that all cubes are really one and the same cube.Only the second step crosses over into Platonism, as Badiou does when he claims that paintings of a horse by prehistoric cavemen and by Pablo Picasso are both paintings of

the same

horse.Alain Badiou, , trans.A.Toscano (London:Continuum, 2009).The fact that Platonic solids and recurrent mathematical objects may prove useful to architects——in large part because they can be recalled by the human mind in a way that today’s irregular parametric 3D-printed volumes cannot——does not entail the transcendent/Platonic realist claim that a concrete form is really just an exemplar of something beyond all concrete forms.Architectural realism cannot be a transcendent realism,because this would take the real out of individual buildings and reassign them to a mathematical alternate world.Among other problems, this would reduce all

specific

formal or programmatic considerations to the status of mere accidents.In similar fashion, Badiou loses both the caveman’s and Picasso’s paintings as anything other than generic lessons about horses, so that no art has anything specific to say about either Secretariat, Bucephalus, or children’s story-time favorite Black Beauty.Anna Sewell, (New York:Dover, 1993).

It might therefore seem that the best available architectural realism is the immanent kind.Rather than making pretentious mathematical claims about the nature of architecture, we instead use mathematical elements as building blocks to create more intricate and singular forms that happen to be situated in specific programmatic and environmental contexts.This is not the Platonic realism of real objects indifferent to whatever section of the base material world they happen to be incarnated in, but a “materialist” realism of objects that exist only in very specific relations with all other objects in their vicinity.But this version of realism does not work for architecture any better than the first.For if transcendent/mathematical realism made the site of architecture too abstract,the immanent variety renders it too concrete, thus over-identifying a building with its actual current use.A different way of putting it, if we replace Badiou’s extreme version of mathematical formalism with Eisenman’ s more sensible and architecturally serviceable one, is that the“mathematical” (transcendent) and “political” (immanent) forms of realism amount to what Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) calls undermining and overmining.Graham Harman, “Undermining, Overmining, and Duomining:A Critique, ” in , ed.Jenna Sutela(Aalto, Finland:Aalto University Design Research Laboratory, 2013), 40 -51.Undermining refers to the intellectual method of explaining things away by reducing them to their smallest constituent pieces.

Although obviously common in the natural sciences, this method is relatively rare in architecture, which works in the medium not of the tiny but of the mid- to large-sized.Among the rare exceptions are the young Eisenman’s reflections on basic foundational solids and Rem Koolhaas’s controversial 2014 Venice Biennale exhibit, which famously decomposed architecture into constituent elements such as arches, windows, roofs, and doorknobs.The bigger danger for architecture by far is overmining, or the upward reduction of buildings to programs or functions.For instance, David Ruy has warned that this may ultimately mean reducing specific pieces of architecture to the environment as a whole, as buildings vanish into a wider logic of the carbon footprint.David Ruy, “Returning to (Strange) Objects, ” (Spring 2012):38-42.Given the danger of both of these strategies, the parallel realisms connected with them(undermining :transcendent ::overmining :immanent) must also be discarded in favor of a new kind.And this is why the new realism must be an

anti-materialist

realism, since materialism in its two basic forms simply repeats the undermining and overmining methods:namely, the traditional materialism that breaks everything down into tiny physical particles, and the more fashionable present-day kind that reduces everything upward into cultural-discursive constructions and“contingency.”Graham Harman, : (Cambridge, UK:Polity, 2016), 132.In fact, despite its extensive use of bulky and obtrusive physical materials, architecture is every bit as non-materialist as visual art, given that both disciplines generate products that are to a large degree unknowable:witness the oblique and poetic character of even the very best art and architecture criticism, as opposed to the direct discursive accuracy of scientific prose, which is too often viewed as the sole acceptable form of rational discourse in every field.Graham Harman, “The Third Table, ” in , ed.C.Christov-Bakargiev (Ostfildern, Germany:Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012), 540–42.Nonetheless, there is a very important difference between art and architecture from the standpoint of modern philosophy,though it is not widely realized that this is to architecture’s credit.Consider Kant’s line of argument in his

Critique of Judgment

, no doubt still the best work of aesthetics that the human species has produced.Immanuel Kant, , trans.W.Pluhar (Indianapolis:Hackett, 1987).Just as an ethical act for Kant must be free of any ulterior interest, beauty for Kant must be free of any personally agreeable character, and of course free of any usefulness.Given that architecture (like design more generally) differs from art precisely through its incorporation of useful purposes, it follows that architecture will always have a lower status for Kant than a “purer”aesthetic form such as poetry.In fact, the few references to architecture in the Third Critique are sketchy and somewhat dismissive, even if they lack the open contempt that Schopenhauer will later show toward architects.

III.Aesthetic Autonomy without Purity

But here Kant is wrong in a way that spoils his aesthetic realism, with its autonomous beautiful forms lying beyond every ulterior purpose.Namely, Kant conflates

autonomy

with

purity

,though these are two entirely different notions.The concept of autonomy that dominates Kantian philosophy fits naturally well with the new sort of “realism” we have been seeking in this article.For example, Kant’s ethics is “realist” in our sense, precisely by divorcing the ethical act from any historically undermining or consequential overmining, and making the ethical act something that exists in its own right and for its own sake.Immanuel Kant, , 2nd ed, trans.M.Gregor & J.Timmerman (Cambridge,UK:Cambridge University Press, 2012).Likewise, his aesthetics is “realist” in our new sense as well, insofar as it makes beauty something self-contained, free of any production of personally agreeable sensations.But Kant goes a bridge too far when he misinterprets this autonomy of the ethical act or aesthetic object as a

purity

in which human and object must be eternally separated.For in fact, we can speak of the autonomy of a human’s relation to an object just as easily as we can speak of the autonomy of a human being or an object taken individually.To take a historical example, the Viking longboat can be treated as a unified autonomous object irreducible to its smallest pieces or its contextual effects,

without

thinking that we need to subtract the Vikings from their longboats to keep these boats autonomous and real.The historical longboat is actually a Viking-boat hybrid, just as water is a hydrogen-oxygen hybrid.See also Graham Harman, “The Only Exit from Modern Philosophy, ” 3 (2020):132-46.On the topic of hybrids in philosophy the is Bruno Latour, , trans.C.Porter(Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1993).If there is one mission incumbent upon post-Kantian philosophy, it is that we learn how to think of hybrids in a

realist

sense rather than a merely relational one in which objects are held to be fully used up by whatever they happen to be doing at the moment.This means that we need a realism of

impure

things rather than Kant’s favored pure ones:an autonomy of objects from their environments that does not require objects to be devoid of heterogeneous internal elements.One of the consequences of this would be that architecture should become a far more important topic in aesthetics than it was in the

Critique of Judgment

.